People with early to moderate Alzheimer's disease or dementia suffer from both memory loss and the inability to operate complex devices. These people are often anxious about missing events or activities, or forgetting other time-based issues. Consequently, these people often write copious notes to themselves. The accumulation of notes results in another form of confusion because they forget which notes matter and when they matter.
With the growing popularity of portable devices, such as smartphones and tablet devices, one might assume that these devices might be pressed into service, as an aid to helping persons with reduced cognitive or physical ability remember important events. However, this is by no means as simple as it might at first blush appear. Persons with reduced cognitive ability may have extreme difficulty interacting with these portable devices. First, on account of the reduced cognitive ability, the person may not understand how to use a particular user interface feature or application running on the device. Second, as is frequently the case, the person may also have physical disabilities that make it difficult to manipulate user interface features on the device.
To make matters worse, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to designing a user interface that is well-suited to a particular person's level of cognitive or physical ability. Moreover, as is unfortunately the case, a person's abilities may also degrade over time. Thus a perfectly adapted user interface one day may no longer fit the person's needs six months later.
Family members are anxious to help, and yet they too can struggle with user interface complexities. Although family members may think they have delivered their aging loved one a helpful portable device, there is truly little way of knowing if the device actually helps at all. Quite too often, the portable device will sit unused in the elderly person's room because it is perceived by that person as too foreign and complex to be useful. When a family member ultimately learns that the device is not being used, he or she has no effective way to correct the situation, as the typical family member is by no means an expert in user interface design for the cognitively or physically impaired.